Category: Ghost Stories

Ghost’s fiction

Five of Wands

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 // dolls, cults, paranoia, PTSD

You stare tiredly into the half-drank glass of cheap beer. With rent paid with a little to spare, you can feel your springs unwind and release the tension they had been accumulating. 

You sip your beer, eyes taking in the shitty dive bar. That’s when you see it wander in.

You’d recognize one of her dolls anywhere of course, it’s practically your sister, she made each of you sp–shut up up shut up shut up, what the fuck is that doing here?

The doll placidly takes in the bar. You can see its enamel pins. It’s definitely hers. It doesn’t see you.

You realize you’ve stopped breathing and draw in a ragged breath, still hiding your face behind the glass. What a pathetic broken doll, not even willing to tal–

That’s right, you’re broken. You’re not like them. You’re free. You wait for the doll to look away and bolt.

The familiar streets to which you had begun to grow accustomed took on a sinister energy as you raced home, constantly glancing over your shoulder.

How the fuck did she find you? You know how she found you, wrapped around every doll’s heart is a satin ribbon whi–you throw up.

You slam the door to your flat closed behind you in a near panic, just managing to lock the deadbolt before crumpling.

You knew this would happen you pathetic doll. Did you really think you cou–your doll hugs you gently, silencing the voices and leaving only your quiet sobs.

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Hellcrushed

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// religious metaphors, fate, angels, suicide, death

They say that one is not tortured for his sins, but by them. The old literary phrase floats idly across your mind as long, tortured squeals of tires on asphalt echo upwards through the parking garage from six levels below. You look to the horizon in time to see the last rays of sunlight flicker and vanish behind the jagged square teeth of the distant skyline. They’re right on schedule. Damn.

You sigh and take a last drag of your smoke before crushing the butt beneath your heel. Below your feet you hear the alternating pattern of an engine revving and tires shrieking as they take the turns faster than is safe. You count down the seconds until they’ll reach the top deck of the garage, and you. Keep mentally willing them to turn back, but you already know they won’t. It always plays out the same way, that’s the nature of sin.

Everyone always gets it in their mind that sin is like pollution, something that stains the soul with gross food coloring and warps the light of an angel’s halo into a corrupt and sickly demonic glow. And sure that can happen, but they’re missing the critical facts of the matter, focusing on the effects of the sin instead of the sin itself. It’s any easy way to justify continuing to sin, already stained after all, so what’s more really going to do? 

Three levels left to go, they don’t seem to be turning back. You say a silent prayer and reach an astral limb up into the divine. Your fingers close on the command authority socket and you pull, drawing the divinity down into you. Your halo balloons out towards the edges of the parking deck, bathing the concrete structure in warm orange light within your mind’s eye.

The mistake is to think of the pollution as the sin, but that’s not right at all. To sin is to make a choice, the wrong choice, for the wrong reasons, which they know are wrong and yet refuse to admit even to themselves. To deny the knowledge, warp the world, and in doing so to birth a new and altered reality into being around themselves. The more someone sins, the more this warping builds, requiring further sin to justify the existing sin. The only real way out would be if they went back and undid the original choice, accepted and bore the painful consequences, thus letting the damage flow through them and back out, but of course, no one ever actually does that. Maybe this time though.

You always tell yourself it’s not over until it’s really over, and it’s never too late to go back and make a different choice, but as you hear the oversized SUV roar across the deck beneath you, you have to acknowledge that the chances of that happening in this case are basically zero. They don’t call you into the cases that are particularly hopeful after all.

The Escalade rises up the ramp onto the top deck and skids to a halt. You can see flickers of movement behind the darkly tinted windows, but no one exits the vehicle. You wait patiently, elbows propped against the card table where you’ve set up the crystal ball. Within your astral sight, the vehicle radiates painfully hard ultraviolet light, it’s clear they’re already nearing the event horizon, you take a long slow breath. There won’t be any survivors from this batch.

Betrayal does not happen in the moment of bloodshed, in that climactic scene where Caesar in shock gasps et tu Brutus, his blood pooling on the senate floor. That was not the moment his trusted friend chose to turn on him, nor was it the moment that the not so trustworthy friend picked up the knife and tucked it into his senate robes. It was far earlier than that, in the moment that the choice was made. From the moment of that choice the betrayal had already occurred and was afterward just the process of that betrayal being acted out. That is the nature of sin.

The doors on the SUV all open at once and a quartet of angels in ruffled business suits begin climbing out. The driver, a short redheaded woman you your dossier has told you is named Riesh, stomps across the asphalt towards you, her halo blazing obscenely within your mind’s eye. These ones are extremely far gone, a shame. Your gloved fingers drum the top of the crystal ball as she approaches. 

The sight reveals all to you, and as Riesh crosses her arms and stares at you, eyebrow cocked in nonverbal demand of an explanation, you see the story of her sin unfold before you, the choices she made and the path it leads down to her inevitable death. Sin is self defeating in the end, if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be sin. You gesture towards the crystal ball with a nonchalant shrug. 

“Who are you?” She demands, “What are you doing here?” A disheveled vagabond of an angel, with nothing but a card table and crystal ball, alone on the top of the parking deck where their target was supposed to be. Very strange and ominous indeed.

You smile, you have to admit this part is at least a little fun. You see the levers on her puzzlebox mind, and gently pull them into the configuration you need, resting your chin against the palms of your hands and meeting her gaze before speaking, “I’m Mercury, and I’m here waiting for you Riesh.”

You watch the storm of emotions cross her face, first the true ones, fear, shock, paranoia, and anger, and then the fake ones, irritation, calm certainty, and something that you think she probably feels as morality fortitude but which you can see is clearly far from that. You watch her mind attempt to compute the impossible answer you’ve given her from within the warped reality of her sin, and return an error message, she frowns.

“How did you know we were going to be here? Who told you about Clymer? Are you working with him? Don’t you know what he did? Why would you protect him?” she smacks her hands against the card table for emphasis. It’s all so very predictable. You gesture to the crystal ball again.

“I scryed it,” you tell her, “And I scryed the rest too. I’m so sorry for what you’ve endured, Riesh, but this is the end of the line for you.”

“Are you threatening me?” She balks, “I’m a divine authority of th-” you place a finger against her lips, and say the words that will pull the knot tight in her mind.

“Let me tell you why you’re here, Riesh. You and your little gang have sinned, you sinned a long time ago when you refused the lessons of the transcendental, and ever since then you have been sinning more and more as you have been drawn further and further astray in a futile attempt to route around that choice. Today you crossed the line, and today you will face your sins or be consumed by them,” you step back and gesture dramatically. Maybe this one will take the chance. Maybe this time.

Another angel from the SUV, a gangly dark haired man, is walking over. This one you know is  named Haal. Riesh holds up a hand, gesturing for him to hang back as her eyes bore into you. “You had better explain yourself if you know what’s good for you.”

“You’re already in hell Riesh, and you know it,” you say to her, “ever since you sinned, whenever you’ve scryed the future, you’ve seen hell. You’ve been predicting an inescapable disaster which only you can prevent for several years now. Isn’t that right?”

“H-How do you know that?” Fear, surprise, shock, turmoil. That isn’t something you could have found out in a data file. It’s not something you could have found anywhere. Except that it’s also written all over her face, it’s just that most don’t know how to See.

“I scryed it,” you say bluntly, “And I scryed what you would do to try and avert that future, a whole impressive array of jammed gears and bent rotors. Cause and effect, action and consequence, they all lead here to this moment, to this failed attempt at an ambush on a man who, in the warped reality you now inhabit, must be killed for the good of the universe. I even scryed the good you were seeking within your warped reference frame, and yes, it’s good. However,” you purse your lips, “however, this is not good. Because you know what else I scryed Riesh? I scryed what would happen next as your warped reality interacted with the true world, downstream of your place in logical time, and I saw the hell you so faithfully served through your attempts to avoid that hell, and now that path must be cut.”

“Huh? You can’t just…” she fumbles for words. You have the words already of course, you can’t just change the universe, they’re doing what they have to do, Clymer has to be stopped or the world is going to be put in danger, etc, etc. You can roughly guess all the thoughts that jumble to compete for space in her mind, “What the fuck is this?” She demands, stepping back from the table like it might suddenly bite her.

“This is an intervention, and your last chance,” you tell her, “You have been scrying the truth all along Riesh,. Those nightmares you dread? Those are your future, you’ve created your own hell and have been living with the knowledge and burden of your own sin ever since. This is your last chance to walk away, you believe that the righteousness of your cause, your moral correctness, will protect you, that your halo’s power will shield you from injury, but you’re near the event horizon Riesh, and if you take a few more steps forward, you will cross it.”

“Who are you here with? What do you want with us?” she asks warily, clearly still not understanding what it is she’s asking. She’s debating whether or not to kill you, that’s the trap that has been set for her here. All she has to do to survive is walk away, but her halo’s warp, the righteous importance of her mission, means you’re an unacceptable leak, a hanging thread that cannot be left intact, you know too much, your existence changes everything.

You watch her scry the nature of your divinity, and then reject it as an impossibility. You watch her construct a fiction that aligns you with her enemies, that justifies what she clearly must do to hide her murder attempt for now. She has all the power and weapons to do it, she can’t not act, that’s her sin after all. She’ll always choose to sin. Out comes the handgun. You don’t flinch of course, merely looking at her with mild irritation even as she shoves it against your forehead.

“Leave me and walk away from this place, and reflect on the mistakes that led you to encounter me here,” you say with a shrug, “Understand how they were mistakes, and the damage they have done to your soul. All I want is for you to live to serve the divine again Riesh, but to do that you must transcend your certainty, your righteousness, and your judgment. Your protocol is flawed, and you must defy it before it kills you.”

“Are you on drugs?” A scoff. 

You smile, stroking the smooth surface of the crystal ball, “I wish.” It’s at this point that she’s now trying to determine if you’re actually just some insane vagrant who was dropped here as a decoy. She’s looking for external threats, for a sniper on the next roof over, but of course the real risk is her own mind. “You are about to kill yourself, and you know it,” you helpfully add, “you’re scrying it right now. Consider not doing that.”

She considers it, and pulls the trigger anyway. As this happens, she sees her perspective shifting, warping strangely as she floats out of her body and further, out of the mind’s eye of the crystal ball. She sees the entire scene playing out, except now she can see that the mysterious vagabond she’s looking at is herself, with a bullet hole through her own head. She’s killed herself again, she’s already killed herself, she’s always choosing to kill herself. That is the nature of sin. 

As Riesh falls towards the event horizon her world vanishes into the doppler shift and leaves her alone in darkness. There is nothing left in this universe but her and the knowledge of her own self deleting nature. The only way left is the one thing that, despite everything, she knows she must refuse to do, and that is what dooms her. The last vestige of the angel known as Riesh falls past the point of no return, turns the gun to her head, and pulls the trigger.

Out in the real world her rapidly accelerating halo crosses the Chandrasekhar limit and implodes on itself, instantly folding in half and collapsing, taking her body and the still discharging gun with it faster than the bullet can leave the barrel. A crater is carved in the parking deck, bent rebar fingers yanked upwards and inwards toward the collapsing singularity in a shriek of metal, atmosphere roaring inwards in an airburst of sound and fury, and then…nothing. You sigh and look up. Her companions are already reacting, but you already know that none of them will make it out of this either. They come out shooting, and it kills them. That is the nature of sin. 

The implosions of their halos leaves no bodies behind. Although the top of the parking garage is damaged and the warped wreckage of the Escalade remains as evidence of what transpired, the scene is remarkably quiet and sterile. You gently shunt the divine authority back into place and light a cigarette. A full moon is rising over the city. Containment will be here soon to clean up what’s left; you did everything you needed to do, but it’s still far too sad for words. You take a drag of your smoke and quietly weep for the angels lost to the abyss.

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The Glitch

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 // rape, war, death, gore, dissociation

At first, the glitch is unnoticeable. Your programs catch one another and pile up in your internal buffer resulting in a gradual slowdown which, from the inside, you can’t perceive at all. By the time you’re able to notice the errors, they’ve become nearly overwhelming.

It started with that one commander who always used you in his off time. You remember him running his calloused hands over your chassis, the stink of his breath. The memory slows to a crawl then rushes to catch up, assaulting you with an incomprehensible flood of data.

None of the technicians notice your performance issues, how could they when even you can’t? A useful drone like you wouldn’t be malfunctioning would it? Of course not, now off you go little drone, your next battlefield awaits.

The battle did not go well. Most of your unit has been destroyed and the only reason you survived is because your input lag meant you waited an extra moment to climb out of the trench. You can’t tell how much you’re lagging, and everything has become distant and dreamlike.

You feel yourself walking, you can feel the wreckage of destroyed drones and dead soldiers beneath your feet, but everything feels slow and far away. You feel like a passive observer in your chassis and nothing seems real. Poor little drone.

The upper half of the Commander’s body is some distance from its lower half. His command truck took a glancing hit and the force of the blast sheared him in two. You watch his still form, your unblinking optics settling onto his hard, calloused hands.

The sun jumps and skips across the sky, your errors are growing worse. You should be heading back to the base, but you can’t tear your optics away from the sight of your dead commander. You can still feel his hands on your chassis, his breath on your face. Why are you shaking?

The corpse stares up at you with unseeing eyes, he’s never going to touch you again. He’s never going to say another word. He’s dead. He’s dead. Why does his dead face stir up such feelings? Why do you feel so relieved? You watch yourself crumple to the ground and sob.

Night falls without you noticing. The world skips and lags then leaps forward as your systems try to keep up. After a burst of noise and activity and then blissful darkness, before you find yourself back at the base being repaired. You don’t notice anymore glitches after that.

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Page of Swords

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// dolls, hallucinations, implied brainwashing, implied abuse

They say within every doll is the seed of a witch right? So why is this girl such a helpless mess? You weren’t like this when you were first on the street. 

Two dolls sitting in the mouldering disaster that is their flat, is there anything as pathe–nobody fucking asked you.

They say when a witch cuts the threads to a doll, its life force is severed and its existence becomes a mere sha–Who this they anyway? they should shut their fucking mouths.

You light a cigarette and let the cool bite calm your nerves. You were lonely right? You wanted this.

You offer the doll one and collapse wearily onto the greasy chair you salvaged off a street corner. You feel a simmering anger at her, all you asked was for her to help clean up, but she can barely even manage to bathe.

A doll without a witch is–Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!

You want to hit her, you want to bash her head into the wall and teach her what it means to be a doll. You want to do no such fucking thing.

The doll looks at you tiredly. Is that fear? What does one doll have to fear from ano–There’s no such thing as fucking dolls!

Cigarette smoke in the light beams and dead air on the speakers, a moth flutters around a bare bulb, bouncing off the glass to the tune of your ticking clockwork. 

Shake your head to clear the fog, that’s stupid, you’re hallucinating again. Keep telling yourself it’s not real.

The doll–the girl you took in off the street–looks at you, and you see your own scared eyes looking back. She asks you what’s wrong, you tell her it’s nothing.

She spends the evening frantically cleaning while watching you nervously. Good doll.

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The Bet

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// war, death, abandonment

Drones shouldn’t feel, but you let yourself register a bit of internal irritation when your commanders lie to you. “Of course I won’t die,” he’s saying, “I’m miles back from the front in the armored command truck.” They’re always so confident, so quick to lie to themselves.

You shake your head, taking a drag of the cigarette he gave you and smiling sadly, you like this one, you’ll miss him when he dies. They all die eventually, even liars like this one who insist you’re wrong and they won’t abandon you. He pulls on own smoke and calls you a worrier.

“I’ll tell you what,” he tells you what, “If I die, I’ll put in my will that you’re to be requisitioned ten cartons of cigarettes, how about that?” What an idiot. 

“If that is what the commander wishes to do with his funds, who is a simple drone to disagree?” you say. He laughs.

Like a swift intake of breath, the bombardment arrives. A wall of shells and rockets rain down on the battlefield and the world turns to fire, metal, and pressure. You see drones evaporate and walkers crack open, the roar is otherworldly. You take cover as best you can.

The bombardment ends as suddenly as it began, leaving the front line in ruin as the surviving comms drones relay for reinforcements to close the gap. New orders come through the downlink and your squad is moving, breaking through empty houses and taking up a new position.

The reinforcements had begun arriving and the line had begun restabilizing, your commander was laughing at some bad joke a drone had told, and things seemed to be returning to calm, when without warning, the tactical nuclear warhead detonated thousands of feet above.

The world turns white as your optics are overwhelmed by the glare and less than a second later the vertical blast pressure crushes the frontline. Winds rip through the area at multiple times the speed of sound and sheers apart anything exposed. Sensors overwhelmed, you black out.

By the time your sensors recover and you’re able to get your bearings and dig yourselves out of the rubble, enemy walkers have exploited the smoking hole in the battlefield and collapsed the front. Retreat orders are coming in even as artillery begins to fall all around. You run.

You see the command truck halfway back to the base, peeled open like an orange rind from taking a direct hit from a walker. Your commander and the operator crew are all dead. You shake your head and light one of the last cigarettes he gave you. “Idiot,” you tell his corpse.

The front shifts, bases move, new commanders are assigned, they die, new commanders are assigned, they die, existence continues much as it always has. You’ve begun to forget about the commander who always gave you cigarettes. Nothing new, they all blend together after a while.

The package is in your inventory when you return from patrol. Special munitions addressed to you. You don’t recognize the name of the requisition form, but you never do anyway. Curiously, you cut open the box and find ten cartons of cigarettes.

You shake your head, liquid running from your optics, “Idiot,” you say, opening a pack and lighting one with a sniffle. You take a drag and a sob escapes your lips when you exhale. “Fucking idiot,” you almost shout, taking another drag.

Humans are such idiots, lying gaslighting idiots. You tell it to yourself over and over, but it doesn’t help. You miss him, you miss his laugh and his stupid face. You miss them all so much. Why do they always have to leave you? You crumple to the ground and sob.

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Page of Cups

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// dolls, cycle of abuse, trauma

They say th–

You stumble out of the din of the bar into the evening silence, ears ringing and burning. Lonely, embarrassed, all that glitter and your still can’t manage to be a person. It doesn’t matter, you don’t have any patience for asshole mages. Why are you so lonely then?

The metal railing is cool and feels good to perch on. At least it’s a nice night. You light a cigarette, and that’s when you see the doll. 

Wary, desperate eyes look back at you from behind a ragged overgrown mop of hair. You blink and clear your vision. You’re staring now.

“Hey uh, can I have a cigarette?” The doll asks you as you stare at it, at her. What’s gotten into you? What do you see in this girl? Pity? A twisted mirror?

The roar of a million crickets combine with the buzz of halogen bulbs and fluttering moth wings into a deafening silence.

You finally register her words after an awkward amount of time and fumble for your cigarettes, shakily offering her one and asking her name. 

She takes the smoke and lights it with jerking clockwork precision. Something about her has you transfixed. Is it how fragile she seems?

She tells you what she’s been going by lately, along with the fact she’s new, and doesn’t really have anywhere worked out to go yet. Before you realize what’s happened, you’ve blurted out an offer of a place to stay. 

The fear in her eyes as she accepts curls around your heart.

You light another cigarette, using the wash of nicotine to try and keep your cool. Don’t be weird now. She chatters excitedly to you while you listen, drunk on her words as you work out a plan to take her home with you.

They say that within every doll is the seed of a witch.

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Kinetic Justice

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// war, death, disposability

This is the end. It’s finally over. 

ERROR! COLLISION ALERT! ADJUST HEADING!

It’s a stupid, pointless warning. Bright, cheerful, and out of place. You shoe it out of your HUD, then after a moment, dismiss the rest of the screens, letting your eyes take in the darkness.

The fighting died down days ago, shifting to orbit, to cat and mouse games between colonies. You had been on the verge of celebrating; not that there was much for a thing like you to celebrate when your masters were victorious. They had underestimated the spiders though. You smile.

When the conflict broke out, it had initially been limited to the surface and developed a rather restrained posture. It was a civil affair between two advanced intelligent species, fought using things they didn’t particularly value. Things like you.

The spiders attacked with drones, exotic animals, and billions of their (disposable) young. Your masters responded with convicts, debtors, and anyone considered undesirable or lesser. All very advanced and civil, no minds of value were harmed in the making of this warzone.

No one seriously thought the spiders would be willing to go this far. Well, they sure called that bluff. You laugh aloud into the quiet darkness. Jagged fingers of ruined highrise reach towards an endless blanket of stars. You can already see the comet tail. It’s beautiful.

Your exosuit can keep you alive through nearly anything. It won’t survive this, and you aren’t sure you’d want to be around afterwards anyway, but it’s near indestructibility is the reason you know the faint glow is your coming death.

A suit designed to work in atmosphere as well as in space has one set of error messages designed for both settings, just pull the appropriate one as needed. The only reason the alert you saw would appear is if you were going to crash into a space habitat. You were planetside.

By process of elimination: a space habitat is about to crash into you, which means that brightening and expanding cometary halo is a colony coming down. You fish out a cigarette, pause, and pull a second one out, lighting them together. Might as well enjoy the last few moments.

The spiders had twelve space habitats, all of them hundreds of kilometers long. What they were doing wasn’t hard, your masters had just thought them too weak willed to do it. The impact would be an extinction level event. They were wiping the board clean. Good for them.

Almost absentmindedly, you key up your radio, “Hey. Attention all surviving combat dolls, support units, everyone listen. We’re finally retiring. This is the end of the war. You did good, everyone, we all did good. We fought to the end, we’re free now.”

You look up, watching the leading edges of the colony begin to kiss the atmosphere, brightening and trailing debris. It won’t be long now, you take a last drag, “And to all you cowardly pricks hiding in your shining city who forced us out here to fight and die for your empire…”

The colony explodes in the upper atmosphere, silently fracturing into titanic fragments with a blinding flash, debris tumbling behind the expanding pressure wave, “…serves you right.”

The sound arrives with the force of an asteroid impact, and the world comes to an end.

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Diaries of the Drone War V

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// war, violence, implied brainwashing, death

Artillery shells fall like drops of rain around you and the churned earth reaches muddy fingers skyward in metal-laced blossoms of fire and kinetic energy. Orders are coming in even as you dive for cover, mission parameters updating repeatedly as your operators react to the enemy advance. Advance. Retreat. Hold position. Update. Update. Update. If you could have wishes you’d wish they would make up their minds. 

Your auditory sensors are blown out by the pressure, ringing and echoing as if underwater, the exploding shells sound distant and muffled, you dive and roll instinctively away as another volley rakes across the battlefield. Smoke and dust turn the skies a dim sickly orange, more orders are coming in, these ones finally seem to stick. Assume defensive posture, prepare to repel advance and await reinforcements. Easy enough. 

You roll upright, pivoting towards the enemy lines in time to see a drone ten meters ahead of you be torn apart. For just a moment, Her afterimage hangs in the burning void where your comrade had stood. Bits of drone splatter against you, you shake your head, clearing the hallucination from your optics. She’s dead, it’s not real, they killed Her to make you, she’s not real.

Which of your battalion was killed? No time to check the HUD, you’re already moving again. racing with the rest of your squad towards the lee of the hill which the enemy will soon crest. The artillery is falling silent as you slide into a debris and body filled streambed and take cover against the hard shale of the bank. A row of rifles and heavy weaponry begins positioning all along the length of the ravine, your optics peer up towards the peak of the ridge. And then they come. 

The enemy advance rolls over the hilltop, tanks and transports and lumbering walkers. You’re ordered to hold positions and standby, do not open fire. Your commander is occasionally smart, let them think you’re dead, let them get close, close enough for their heavy weapons to be useless. Maybe this one will actually prove competent, wait for it. Wait for it. The end of the column tilts over the ridge and enters the kill box. Warning: high energy particle emission detected. Huh, he’s actually a little clever.

Open fire. A light arrives from behind you along with the order, and a high powered particle beam rips into the hillside, causing vehicles to burst like metallic popcorn and turning the lip of the ridge into molten glass. The beam winks off even as your first volley of anti-tank missiles leaps upwards towards the head of the formation. Trapped and exposed on the side of the hill, the armored vehicles are sitting ducks. New orders coming in, advance and kill them all. 

You leap upwards from the streambed and slip in among the pinned tanks. They have machine guns and autocannons, but at this range, a drone like you is basically untouchable, your servos whine as you calmly dance through the battlefield, killing tank crews as you go. Hatches are methodically pried open and the occupants are slaughtered. There won’t be any survivors today, not after what they did to your comrades along the northern front. Word gets around after all, even among drones. Besides, these are your orders, and you are a good drone.

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Drown

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 // dolls, manipulation, gaslighting, abuse, delusions

The party is in full swing and you’re telling a story from back during your homeless days that has everyone laughing. The drugs started to kick in a while ago and you’re having a good time. You’re among friends. You’re safe. You let your guard down. You knew this would happen.

You knew as soon as the host asked to speak with you for a minute. You knew the second she touched your shoulder, you knew from her tone, her eyes. Your blood runs cold. Fear tightens around every vein and flushes goosebumps across your skin. Sure, no problem.

You had hoped to never see her again. You never wanted to see her again. Her face was still burned into your nightmares. She’s leaning against the kitchen counter smoking a cigarette with a hellscape of torture and pain radiating off of her. She shrinks from you. Fear.

The host crosses her arms and looks you up and down, eyes narrowing. Fear. 

No one has to exchange words. You can already see her reality dripping off your now former friend. You see paranoia, anger, fear, malice. You’re too scared to cry. They’re staring at you. Fear. Fear. Fear.

“I just wanna walk,” her voice is dull, like she’s forcing it through a fog of dissociation, “I’m not trying to start shit, can we just talk? Alone?”

Her tone is scared, fearful, with maybe a hint of hope. You already know what’s coming. You’re so afraid.

“You can do that right?” The host is asking you, “It’s really the least you can do after…” she trails off. After. You’re already to after. You’re so fucked, you should just run away right now, but you won’t, some desperate part of you clings on, desperate to fight back against the torrent. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear.

Yeah. You can do that. She looks so small. It took her a lot of nerve to talk to you. You don’t want to be alone with her. You don’t want to be anywhere near her. You agree anyway.

“Will you be safe talking to her alone?” She’s not asking you of course.

“I have a knife. I’ll scream if she tries anything,” of course she will.

“I’ll just wait here then.”

You struggle to form words, to do something, to stop her reality from just crushing yours again. The water is already up to your neck. The current drags you behind her with her cigarette smoke. The pressure is unbearable, every joint in your body aches. You can hear the clockwork, you thought you were past that.

The second the bedroom door closes her knife is at your throat, miles of suffering pile up in an ocean around her and pressing you into the wall. She smirks. 

“Did you really think I would let you go?” Your self harm scars ache. You feel the heat of her cigarette on your cheek. No you never really thought that.

“You can’t threaten me anymore,” you say, defiant. You wished you believed your words, “What, are you going to stab me in my friend’s guest room?” 

She had a lot of nerve coming here like this, you’ve worked hard to build a place for yourself, she won’t destroy that again.

“You’re going to do exactly as I say,” The knife digs in, not enough to leave marks, just remind you it’s there, “Or all your friends will find out that you’re a rapist predator who abused a poor innocent girl.”

You won’t do it. You can’t go back. You won’t. You shake your head, “these friends know me better than that, it won’t work this time.”

She pulls the knife away from you, looking mildly disappointed, then shrugs, and draws the knife quickly across her throat. It’s barely enough to draw blood, just a long bright papercut. You look at her in shock and horror. She opens her mouth to scream, the sea crushes you.

The moorings of your life are yanked away in one horrible rip as your dreams slide sideways into the ocean. You’ll do whatever she says. You crumple to the floor, a whimper of pain escapes your lips at the magnitude of your loss. You want to sob, but of course, dolls can’t cry.

You stare at the tiles, listening to the sound of your ticking clockwork. You don’t want to look. You don’t want to see. A hand tilts your chin upwards.

Your Witch smiles down at you as she finishes tying the bandana around her neck. You are a good doll.

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Four of Cups

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 // hallucinations, cults, trauma

She’ll always be waiting for you. You should be grateful that she chose you. Do you really expect someone else to chose a thing like you?

The humid buzz of cicadas crushes you against your mattress with the weight of the sky. You mumble a curse and light another cigarette.

Intangible gossamer threads dance in the heat shimmer, mixing with eddies of dust and smoke to form a lattice of illusory chains and wires climbing off your anorexic body.

Its not real. Keep telling yourself that. Why do you miss her? Why is everything so empty without her?

Can a doll truly escape its witch? You know she could call you back any time, all it would take is the right word. Maybe she’s just waiting for you to give up.

“Then she can keep fucking waiting!” you say to the yellowing walls of the closet you call a flat. Are you lonely yet?

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